Most people I know that actually *have* a computer science degree, don't mind Visual Basic. They realize that underneath it all it's just another Turing machine with a better interface. Yes, you can abuse it. Just like Excel is abused to build entire BI-solutions. A fool with a tool and all that...
And if the 1.8% efficient solar cell costs 1 dollarcent to manufacture, can be installed by rolling out a sheet of plastic and has a lot of other advantages as well - and then suddenly doubles its output, becoming cost-effective versus other methods of creating energy, that would STILL be brilliant. Conversion efficiency isn't the onliest criterium for success in photovoltaics.
Eh, as a socialist, I hate to tell you this but you're not a socialist. You're a social democrat. Social democrats split from the socialists in 1914. The social democrats claim it's actually the socialists who split and called themselves communists thereafter, but then they were the ones betraying their constituens wholesale, so I'd argue it would be them who split.
I'm an IT-consultant. And my main problem right now is dealing with IT-sysadmins that have policies and beards from the 70's. The users are actually mostly quite reasonable - they just want to get some work done.
Here are a few recent quotes:
"Well... so your minimum requirements to run that are 8 cores and 32 GB of memory? That's what the suppliers say? Way too much. We'll start with 1 core and 1 GB of RAM because we can always upgrade, it's a virtual server" - cost me about 8 weeks of work. At 100 euro per hour. To fix numerous issues that appeared when running low on memory. Server started to behave in bizarre and unpredictable fashion. Database server didn't like it either. Anyway, we escalated the issue and had another chat.
"Oh you want to upgrade that memory? Well it costs 50 bucks per gigabyte." Okay. "Per month." - WTF??? 800 euro per MONTH in extra costs for memory? We can buy a whole new SERVER with that money.
"Oh dear - we said we could upgrade but the physical machine is full" - WTF? - "Another project used 70 GB for their experiments and now you can't have the extra 4GB we promised you, unless we take it out of the virtual Test-servers" - WTF????
"We upgraded development" - Hurray! But... why is my database slowing down to a crawl? "Oops our bad, we took memory out of the wrong virtual server. While it ran. Is that bad?" - the sight of a dying Oracle database isn't pretty... fortunately it's a pretty robust database:)
"But we always patch the kernel during daytimes. When else would we patch that? And yes we always patch all of the servers at the same time." - to maximize the chance nothing works after the patch? I dunno.
"No you can't plug in your own router. We bill you by the number of extensions you use." - Two days waiting for them to bring their own router along. But they did find our router pretty fast:)
"Yes your network segment is really labelled 'idiots-vlan'. Because everyone keeps asking for stuff we can't allow we opened ALL the ports both ways." - So my laptop, containing all of the information needed to access all of the confidential information I'm dealing with, is sitting naked on the network? Good call. Fortunately we are experienced consultants and all run our own firewall and virus defense.
"No, the users can't access that segment. What do you mean you need them to test stuff? They can't access the servers. Period." - we *STILL* haven't gotten the users access to our testservers. We had to move the testservers into a different network for that. And we can't access them from OUR network segments so we have to use the network to go outside, tunnel back into the official test-segment, then access our servers. Jay.
"So you want to have one of our admins take a look at your solution because we have to manage it later on? No time. Just drop us the instructions when you're done" - great idea: we will leave you with the 500 page manual and a fake phonenumber right before going on holiday. Don't bother calling us if you don't bother listening to us now.
And *all* of these happened over the last few months. Now why do IT-departments have a bad rep...
I've worked with great system architects and administrators. But not all of them are on the same level.
The shell will come with people that you then provide with a position inside your own company and bring their own way of doing things that we were just trying to get rid off. It's not good therapy to infect yourself with the disease you're trying to cure.
That model (good music with ads) is already being pioneered by Spotify, but they're under huge pressure now and just caved in (see yesterday's news on Slashdot). Google would be unlikely to have to cave in, would have a HUGE reach from the start, and could effectively force the labels to agree or die.
I have heard tell that there are businesses that actually use imagining software so that if your machine has a problem, you can initiate a clean install back to the corporate approved image right from the desktop. This way, the users can install the software they need (or even want), and if something goes wrong, it takes less than 5 minutes to start the re-imaging of their system. I have yet to personally see one of these companies.
Too bad. I worked at one for a long time. Good IT dept. Developers got local admin rights (and the note that they only got one form of support, which was a clean re-image). Everyone else that had trouble got a new computer off the racks, logged on, installation commenced and after lunchbreak they could start working again. Nowadays, more and more stuff is virtualized so even less difficult to do this.
Seriously: IT-departments that don't virtualize, and don't centralize their software distribution, and don't get this right, are going to be too expensive to keep. If you are in such a department, make drastic changes fast because otherwise the company WILL outsource your job - because they have to.
I remember a story of WW2 where a crewmember from a flying fortress (tailgunner I believe) couldn't reach his chute due to fire raging on the plane. So he decided to jump rather than burn. During the fall he got unconscious and fell into a pine forest covered with heavy snow. He survived with minor injuries.
Another case was a parachute jumper who got tangled in the cords, chute produced some drag but impact was still way above 100 Km/hr. Fortunately it was a former swamp and the ground tended to give way a bit. Everything fracturable was fractured on the impact points (she even managed to get those points correct as per training) but the woman remained conscious and survived.
I think though that when you drop out at 30.000 feet you will lose your consciousness quite soon and don't have much say in what happens. Which will usually be for the best.
What these 'gay parts of town' usually are without is families and children. An all-adult environment is, well... kinda sterile.
Well, you can solve that the way it is solved in the Netherlands: let gay people marry and adopt children like everyone else.
But we were comparing the situation before (Beirut, noone wants to come there unless you have something shady on your mind) and after (lots of little shops, attractive place to be, artists and other friendly folk on the street 24/7 so place is much safer). Once you have a safe place, families will move in as well. They're just not the first to come and risk the lives of their children, so be happy the people without kids are the pioneers.
I've never found this so. But ofcourse, I write about technical topics of which I know a lot. Not about stuff I don't know anything about but have strong opinions on.
Your comment might be true if judges were drawn by random lot from the population. That may be so in the USA (although I doubt it), but it certainly isn't true where I live. You first have to do law school (university, which already means you sift out approximately 50% of the population right there). Then there are all kinds of additional studies and stages you have to do to qualify. That's the weeding out process and it is intended to weed out the not-so-smart ones.
Furthermore, judges are expected (as in: it's your job) to assimilate a lot of concepts they are not necessarily familiar with and an experienced and competent judge knows what to ask that is relevant to the case at hand. Most professionals in one field could actually be trusted, if competent and experienced, to at least be able to ask good questions about other fields so as to be able to form opinions, and judges are actually in the best position for this due to aptitude, experience and education.
So the assertion that "most fall right in the average" means that either you are (a) surrounded by well-educated people so you have a very biased view on what's average or not (something I encounter in some workplaces where they hire only well-educated people) or (b) just don't understand statistics all that well or (c) don't have a clue as to the education of judges or (d) live in a country where they do things really different from what I'm used to.
The GP wasn't saying he needed 30 seconds to define the difference. He needed more than 30 seconds to explain the role of the person doing that definition to someone who needs things explained in simple terms.
But don't be sad. You hit the straw man right on and it is completely demolished:)
Actually, no. Merely being in range of police during riots is enough to get you gassed, clubbed and whatnot. Even if just curious as to what's happening. If you think different, you've probably never been to a riot before. I can heartily recommend it, it disabuses you quickly of any naive illusions as to the role of police in our society. Worked wonders for me:)
Slashdot Mirror
That... gives whole new meaning to the phrase "Java developers do it in Eclipse" :)
I completely agree with you.
Most people I know that actually *have* a computer science degree, don't mind Visual Basic. They realize that underneath it all it's just another Turing machine with a better interface. Yes, you can abuse it. Just like Excel is abused to build entire BI-solutions. A fool with a tool and all that...
And if the 1.8% efficient solar cell costs 1 dollarcent to manufacture, can be installed by rolling out a sheet of plastic and has a lot of other advantages as well - and then suddenly doubles its output, becoming cost-effective versus other methods of creating energy, that would STILL be brilliant. Conversion efficiency isn't the onliest criterium for success in photovoltaics.
Eh, as a socialist, I hate to tell you this but you're not a socialist. You're a social democrat. Social democrats split from the socialists in 1914. The social democrats claim it's actually the socialists who split and called themselves communists thereafter, but then they were the ones betraying their constituens wholesale, so I'd argue it would be them who split.
I'm an IT-consultant. And my main problem right now is dealing with IT-sysadmins that have policies and beards from the 70's. The users are actually mostly quite reasonable - they just want to get some work done.
Here are a few recent quotes:
"Well... so your minimum requirements to run that are 8 cores and 32 GB of memory? That's what the suppliers say? Way too much. We'll start with 1 core and 1 GB of RAM because we can always upgrade, it's a virtual server" - cost me about 8 weeks of work. At 100 euro per hour. To fix numerous issues that appeared when running low on memory. Server started to behave in bizarre and unpredictable fashion. Database server didn't like it either. Anyway, we escalated the issue and had another chat.
"Oh you want to upgrade that memory? Well it costs 50 bucks per gigabyte." Okay. "Per month." - WTF??? 800 euro per MONTH in extra costs for memory? We can buy a whole new SERVER with that money.
"Oh dear - we said we could upgrade but the physical machine is full" - WTF? - "Another project used 70 GB for their experiments and now you can't have the extra 4GB we promised you, unless we take it out of the virtual Test-servers" - WTF????
"We upgraded development" - Hurray! But... why is my database slowing down to a crawl? "Oops our bad, we took memory out of the wrong virtual server. While it ran. Is that bad?" - the sight of a dying Oracle database isn't pretty... fortunately it's a pretty robust database :)
"But we always patch the kernel during daytimes. When else would we patch that? And yes we always patch all of the servers at the same time." - to maximize the chance nothing works after the patch? I dunno.
"No you can't plug in your own router. We bill you by the number of extensions you use." - Two days waiting for them to bring their own router along. But they did find our router pretty fast :)
"Yes your network segment is really labelled 'idiots-vlan'. Because everyone keeps asking for stuff we can't allow we opened ALL the ports both ways." - So my laptop, containing all of the information needed to access all of the confidential information I'm dealing with, is sitting naked on the network? Good call. Fortunately we are experienced consultants and all run our own firewall and virus defense.
"No, the users can't access that segment. What do you mean you need them to test stuff? They can't access the servers. Period." - we *STILL* haven't gotten the users access to our testservers. We had to move the testservers into a different network for that. And we can't access them from OUR network segments so we have to use the network to go outside, tunnel back into the official test-segment, then access our servers. Jay.
"So you want to have one of our admins take a look at your solution because we have to manage it later on? No time. Just drop us the instructions when you're done" - great idea: we will leave you with the 500 page manual and a fake phonenumber right before going on holiday. Don't bother calling us if you don't bother listening to us now.
And *all* of these happened over the last few months. Now why do IT-departments have a bad rep...
I've worked with great system architects and administrators. But not all of them are on the same level.
No problem - you can download the eBooks to your iPad :)
The shell will come with people that you then provide with a position inside your own company and bring their own way of doing things that we were just trying to get rid off. It's not good therapy to infect yourself with the disease you're trying to cure.
I'm reminded of the Charles Stross story, Accelerando (link: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html). Great novel.
That model (good music with ads) is already being pioneered by Spotify, but they're under huge pressure now and just caved in (see yesterday's news on Slashdot). Google would be unlikely to have to cave in, would have a HUGE reach from the start, and could effectively force the labels to agree or die.
The Green Party has always opposed, and continues to oppose, termination (account suspension) as a remedy for infringing file sharing
What part of that sentence did you skip while reading the GP? :)
I have heard tell that there are businesses that actually use imagining software so that if your machine has a problem, you can initiate a clean install back to the corporate approved image right from the desktop. This way, the users can install the software they need (or even want), and if something goes wrong, it takes less than 5 minutes to start the re-imaging of their system. I have yet to personally see one of these companies.
Too bad. I worked at one for a long time. Good IT dept. Developers got local admin rights (and the note that they only got one form of support, which was a clean re-image). Everyone else that had trouble got a new computer off the racks, logged on, installation commenced and after lunchbreak they could start working again. Nowadays, more and more stuff is virtualized so even less difficult to do this.
Seriously: IT-departments that don't virtualize, and don't centralize their software distribution, and don't get this right, are going to be too expensive to keep. If you are in such a department, make drastic changes fast because otherwise the company WILL outsource your job - because they have to.
Personally, I'd go for SPECTRE. That name alone would tell the corps not to mess with this one :)
And here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade
I remember a story of WW2 where a crewmember from a flying fortress (tailgunner I believe) couldn't reach his chute due to fire raging on the plane. So he decided to jump rather than burn. During the fall he got unconscious and fell into a pine forest covered with heavy snow. He survived with minor injuries.
Another case was a parachute jumper who got tangled in the cords, chute produced some drag but impact was still way above 100 Km/hr. Fortunately it was a former swamp and the ground tended to give way a bit. Everything fracturable was fractured on the impact points (she even managed to get those points correct as per training) but the woman remained conscious and survived.
I think though that when you drop out at 30.000 feet you will lose your consciousness quite soon and don't have much say in what happens. Which will usually be for the best.
Same in Dutch - "belastingparadijs".
Personally, I think the US English version is a mistranslation and everyone has got it right :)
What these 'gay parts of town' usually are without is families and children. An all-adult environment is, well... kinda sterile.
Well, you can solve that the way it is solved in the Netherlands: let gay people marry and adopt children like everyone else.
But we were comparing the situation before (Beirut, noone wants to come there unless you have something shady on your mind) and after (lots of little shops, attractive place to be, artists and other friendly folk on the street 24/7 so place is much safer). Once you have a safe place, families will move in as well. They're just not the first to come and risk the lives of their children, so be happy the people without kids are the pioneers.
It's open source. You can write your own code to solve it :)
Well, I don't have a clue either. But I'm just hoping we're going to get the explanation :)
Looks like I should have taken the time to read the article before posting....
Well, that surely would have been an unexpected move from a slashdot reader :P
I've never found this so. But ofcourse, I write about technical topics of which I know a lot. Not about stuff I don't know anything about but have strong opinions on.
I can see this becoming a card in Magic the Gathering or a similar CCG :)
Your comment might be true if judges were drawn by random lot from the population. That may be so in the USA (although I doubt it), but it certainly isn't true where I live. You first have to do law school (university, which already means you sift out approximately 50% of the population right there). Then there are all kinds of additional studies and stages you have to do to qualify. That's the weeding out process and it is intended to weed out the not-so-smart ones.
Furthermore, judges are expected (as in: it's your job) to assimilate a lot of concepts they are not necessarily familiar with and an experienced and competent judge knows what to ask that is relevant to the case at hand. Most professionals in one field could actually be trusted, if competent and experienced, to at least be able to ask good questions about other fields so as to be able to form opinions, and judges are actually in the best position for this due to aptitude, experience and education.
So the assertion that "most fall right in the average" means that either you are (a) surrounded by well-educated people so you have a very biased view on what's average or not (something I encounter in some workplaces where they hire only well-educated people) or (b) just don't understand statistics all that well or (c) don't have a clue as to the education of judges or (d) live in a country where they do things really different from what I'm used to.
The GP wasn't saying he needed 30 seconds to define the difference. He needed more than 30 seconds to explain the role of the person doing that definition to someone who needs things explained in simple terms.
But don't be sad. You hit the straw man right on and it is completely demolished :)
Aaarrrggghhh....
Actually, no. Merely being in range of police during riots is enough to get you gassed, clubbed and whatnot. Even if just curious as to what's happening. If you think different, you've probably never been to a riot before. I can heartily recommend it, it disabuses you quickly of any naive illusions as to the role of police in our society. Worked wonders for me :)